In this course we will discuss dramatic works by Jewish and Israeli playwrights, authors, and performance artists, in which relations between gender, religion, and cultural identity are explored. By engaging with performance theory we shall discuss topics such as gender and ethnicity, feminism and religion, identity politics in historical and contemporary contexts, and performance as a vehicle for exploring self-identity.

The earth—as we know it today—may cease to exist in the future. With this possibility arises the pressing need to rethink nature in the Anthropocene—the era in which human activities have had a significant impact on the earth’s ecosystems, especially since the advent of James Watt’s steam engine in the late 1700s.

How do media shape the way we see, hear, feel, read, and think about ourselves and the world? How do works of art teach us how to think about media? Does the “media turn” in the humanities cause us to rethink our methods of study?

In his recent Antinomies of Realism, Frederic Jameson identifies an unresolvable tension in the realist novel between two impulses. One is familiar enough: it goes under the banner of récit, the tale, the story, or simply “narrative.” It’s characterized by a movement of progress and a temporality organized by past-present-future. The other impulse, which Jameson curiously calls “affect,” is everything that impedes this narrative movement.

In this course we will study medieval and early-modern manuscripts as complex intersections of materiality, aesthetics, politics, and institutionality. In a first part, students will be introduced into the fundamentals of codicology, paleography, and manuscript illumination: a hands-on phase for which we will use real manuscripts from Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. In addition, we will discuss some seminal critical work on the cultural dynamics of manuscripts.

How, in our recent past and contemporary moment, might a groundbreaking body of poetry—radically innovative in form and content, with great international resonance, and widely perceived to have “gone for broke,” as Theodor W. Adorno famously put it—find its poetics taken up by poets and others artists of different languages, cultures, and sociopolitical situations?

This senior seminar will offer students an introductory overview, as well as in-depth engagement with, the work in aesthetics, literary theory, and criticism developed by the Frankfurt School.  “The Frankfurt School” was the term eventually coined to identify a core group of intellectuals working in and around the Institute for Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung), founded in 1923 and affiliated to this day (except for its exile during and in the immediate aftermath of the National Socialist/Nazi regime) with the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University of Frankfurt. The Institute’s foun

This course will consider the contemporary and queer fate of three Greek tragedies, Sophocles’ Oedipus, the King and Antigone, and Euripides’, The Bacchae. In our readings, we will pay attention to how “tragic” consequences take place when the actions of characters deviate from kinship norms or when kinship relations are not recognized. We will consider as well how queer rewritings of tragic scenes seek to generate alternative ways of thinking about non-normative kinship.  Are all forms of non-normative kinship tragic?

The course will present a survey of major works of medieval literature from some of the principal literary traditions of the Middle Ages, with an emphasis on epic and on Arthurian romance.

The epics that will be examined are the assonanced Oxford version of the Song of Roland (with an extract from the rhymed Châteauroux/Venice 7 version) and Beowulf, as well as the Old Irish saga of the Táin; the romances are those of Chrétien de Troyes, along with Gottfied von Strassburg’s Tristan, Ulrich von Zatzikhoven’s Lanzelet, and the Middle English Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.